Psychology professor Ron Peters is still coming into the office even though he isn’t teaching anymore.

“Old habits are hard to break,” he said.

It’s a habit Peters has had for the last 41 years, but at the end of May he will retire, taking with him memories of the nearly 65,000 students he has instructed.

Most students know Peters as the instructor of the first half of Psychology 101, the psychology department’s large introductory lecture course.

Peters has taught the class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, three class periods in a row for the last 15 years.

He said he has enjoyed sharing his knowledge of psychology with students through his repeated lectures — he came to liken himself to an actor on Broadway, having to do the same show night after night.

“Even if I know what I’m talking about, the people sitting out there don’t know it,” Peters said. “If I get bored, which I do sometimes, I have to cover it up. If you’re not excited about the material, the students won’t be either.”

He said students’ attentiveness to and interest in the course work excited him — another similarity to acting.

“It’s sort of a turn-on to see so many people are paying attention to what you are saying,” he said.

Peters said the most rewarding part of his job; however, was when students remembered him and what they had learned in his class.

“Students will come up to me and say, ‘You don’t remember me, but I was in your Psych 101 class. You really made it enjoyable,'” he said.

“Even if they don’t say anything, they’ll smile at me as they walk by. That’s what this campus needs, more smiles.”

For Peters’ last Pysch 101 lecture, all the faculty from his department came, and the entire class gave him a standing ovation as a farewell.

“I had to shoo them out of class so I could finish,” he said.

“I taught to the bitter end … or the bittersweet end, I guess you could say.”

Kara Houlihan, junior in meteorology and one of Peters’ last Psych 101 students, said students will be missing something when Peters retires.

“He knows a lot, and he can actually share it with people,” she said. “He was a pretty interesting guy.”

Becoming a psychology professor was “pure happenstance” in his case, Peters said, because when he left his small hometown of Manning and went to college at the University of Iowa, he had no idea what he wanted to do.

“I was so na‹ve, I didn’t even know what psychology was about,” he said.

But Peters’ interest in psychology began when a psychology professor asked him to be his research assistant for the summer. Later, he began classwork in this area of study.

He went on to graduate school, then to earn his Ph.D. — all by the age of 24.

Peters landed a job at Iowa State soon after graduation in 1963, in part because of a lecture he gave at the Iowa Academy of Sciences annual meeting, which happened to be held at Iowa State that year.

Members of the ISU psychology faculty attended, and they liked his lecture so much he was offered a job with the department the very next day.

Peters said his retirement from teaching is a “mixed bag.”

“It’s going to be so different that I absolutely will miss [my job]. But if I kept teaching full time, I’d miss a lot of other things,” he said. “I want to do a lot more traveling, spend some time out in the [Rocky] Mountains in the fall when the aspens are turning.”

Peters’ wife, Jen, is also retiring from her position as administrative specialist for the psychology department. Together they will have devoted nearly 80 years of work to Iowa State.

But for now, Peters will continue to visit his office every day. He said he still spends his time there writing lecture notes and outlines — but these lectures are ones he may never have a chance to give.